When the Senate takes up the Homeland Security bill in September, taxpayers will likely not be asked to pay millions of dollars for this deadly junkyard. The chief danger, of course, is the way that it would poison our society's cohesion and mutual trust, turning us into a nation of snitches and paranoids. (Remember Communist East Germany, where documents showed that, to curry favor with the secret police, people informed on their spouses, their best friends and other unsuspecting innocents?)

But a personal experience convinces me that if we tried it, whatever it did to us psychically, it would result in a fiasco.

During Richard Nixon's Watergate experiment with his "enemies list," I was an editor at a Washington newspaper the Nixonites hated. Curious to know if Nixon's authorities had been snooping on me, I used the Freedom of Information Act to get my FBI and CIA files. They came with the usual wide swaths blacked out. But what remained shocked me: Most of the information was totally wrong or absurdly trivial.

For example, the files showed unnamed persons had reported that at some dinner parties I had strongly defended the Ottoman Turks in their genocide of Armenians. It happens that I have spoken consistently and publicly the precise opposite -- and have done so in numerous magazine articles and a book. (I am an Armenian and my family members suffered during those awful events 87 years ago; my mother died and some of my siblings sustained lifetime injuries.) The "patriotic informants" had it exactly reversed.

Another volunteer FBI informant reported that I was "obsessed" with civil liberties and "was believed to belong" to the American Civil Liberties Union. It might have been "believed" because in the years before I became a Washington editor, I was a board member of the highly publicized District of Columbia chapter of the ACLU.

Another item offended me as a taxpayer. While I was a Washington bureau chief, I wrote a profile of J. Edgar Hoover, then the head of the FBI and in the news at the time. I tried to be fair. I wrote what was true: that when Hoover was originally appointed in the 1920s, the investigatory arm of the Department of Justice was a mess and as the new chief, Hoover cleaned up the mess and introduced a more rational organizational structure. But with time, Hoover displayed increasing idiosyncrasies and unchecked power.

In my profile, I included a historically accurate episode. Toward the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt realized that in peacetime, the United States would be increasingly involved with the rest of the world. But unlike other major powers, the United States had no foreign intelligence agency. Roosevelt asked William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, to provide him with a highly secret recommendation on creation of a permanent agency (which became the CIA). But the document was "eyes only," with only four specified persons to see the report. One copy, of course, went to Roosevelt. Of the remaining three, one went to J. Edgar Hoover.

Donovan, an old hand in the bureaucratic wars, knew that Hoover would hate the idea of a competing intelligence service and try to derail it. So, Donovan wrote each of the four documents in a slightly different style. One week after he delivered the document to Roosevelt, the Chicago Tribune, at the time a ferocious opponent of Roosevelt and internationalism, had a lead story damning Roosevelt for planning to create his own personal spy service and printed the Donovan document. It was Hoover's version -- which was what Donovan had suspected would happen.

When I got my FBI file, there was the clipping with that section of the Donovan story underlined, plus an order by Hoover to every FBI station in the country to search local police records for any negative information on me. Most treasured of all, in the margin next to the clipping about the leak to the Chicago Tribune, there was a handwritten notation by the man himself, "Never give this man anything -- H."

What raised my temper was not his marginal note. That was bureaucratic burlesque. My stronger reaction was: "They spent taxpayers' money on all that junk? Searching every local police station around the country because one bureaucrat was embarrassed? And all those dinner party conversations where some unknown informer was unable to get anything straight?"

We're better off without TIPS, Mr. Ashcroft. Promoting the program would mean getting into the junk business. Or worse. Any sinister plans by al Qaeda will get lost in the massive accumulation of wild misinformation.